


books are definitely not dangerous

by pineapplejuice



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Body Horror, Gen, M/M, Michael is a Little Shit, cos. source material is what it is uhh, expect michael to be a terrible role model and gerry to have many valid reasons to hate his mother, gerry starts out disliking michael on principle. which is fair enough, i dont understand tags!, so thats a tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplejuice/pseuds/pineapplejuice
Summary: this came to me in a dream.i take the tma lore and shove it into some sort of american trope of a high school.michael is a jock, gerry is well, goth, and the school library might actually be evil.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	1. dont know shit about accountants

**Author's Note:**

> am doing my best, but i do not know what i am doing.

Gerry Keay was supposed to be studying. It was his free period, he was in the library, his things were right there, but he simply wasn’t.

The library at his school was something of an oddity. Sure, most schools had to have a library, but Gerry had not expected one of this size upon his arrival there. Sure, this school was well funded, but all other buildings were put to shame by the library.

The library spanned two whole floors in its own building, which even with the study areas, felt excessive. The lower section was devoted mostly to textbooks and the usual bookish nonsense, but the upper floor’s books were unusual in tastes. A few fiction and fantasy books were to be expected, of course, but some of the shelves deeper on contained titles the internet insisted didn’t exist and authors no one had never heard of.

This, of course, would have been fine, had the books not been what they were. They were not hardcover or paperback- most of the books that returned zero searches were leather bound books. The contents were the most worrying thing about them, though. The books were full of symbols and alphabets Gerry knew he had no hope of finding anywhere else, and descriptions of creatures and lore that he had heard of nowhere else in his life.

Within the books were a recurring set of characters, even- scrawled in the margins were notes in distinct handwritings, and notes detailing the previous owner(s). It had been years since Gerry had first found the books, while it did feel like there were always more cropping up and waiting to be found, he felt like he had a pretty good grasp on the story line. He was familiar with the characters now- Robinson, Dekker, and Sims- and even when he thought he finished reading through the books, he found himself reading them all over again, trying to uncover deeper mysteries.

On the inside cover of every one of these books was the word Archives in a loopy, fancy handwriting. After cross-checking the inside covers of quite a few of them, there had been just enough variation between the books for him to come to the conclusion that someone had gone through the painstaking process of writing in Archives on every book. And although the books were made by authors who seldom collaborated, the handwriting was pretty clearly done by the same person with immaculate calligraphy.

Gerry had found nineteen Archives books so far, each with the calligraphy on the inside cover and filled to the brim with scribbles about monsters and the people who had fallen prey to them. Every book had a number, engraved on the leather in lieu of a front cover. Currently Gerry was read (#101), but the highest number he had found was (#139). It didn’t make sense to have the books labelled with numbers if those numbers weren’t listing the order in the series, so Gerry assumed there were over a hundred books he had yet to find. 

There was no way these books were anything more than fiction, but it was good and immersive fiction, and Gerry thoroughly enjoyed it.  
Needless to say, Gerry found himself spending a large amount of his free time at school with his back pressed to a shelf, hidden deep within his school’s obnoxiously large library, ignoring the world.

Gerry was a loner, and maybe it was the many years spent in this position and the books he used to distract himself from this fact, but he didn’t particularly mind.

-

Michael rather enjoyed his place in the world as it stood. He was in charge of little more than the epic highs and lows of high school baseball, but for now, it did well enough for him. Michael had brought himself to the top of the social hierarchy by sheer force of personality and sports talent, and damn if he wasn’t proud of it.

He, too, was in the oversized school library, but he was not there willingly.

Mononymously known, Michael was the star pitcher of the baseball team. He was pretty sure that if there had been other Michaels at this school- and with a name like his, there surely had been- they were no longer going by Michael alone. Michael had delegated that name to himself and himself only. A lot came with being part of the sports team that most of the school lived and breathed, and Michael was up to all of it. 

There were teachers that respected him for being the way he was, over the top and practically the definition of obnoxious at times, but Lukas was not one of them. Lukas hated Michael almost on instinct, and when Michael retaliated, Lukas had no problem using the authority of a teacher to make Michael into his errand boy.

Which was how Michael found himself in the second story of the library, in pursuit of a textbook that was clear on the other side of the building. 

As he walked deeper into the bookshelves, perhaps hoping that a neon sign would appear to point him to the right book, he noted the lack of security camera, the lack of staff, and the lack of students.

He pulled books off the shelves, leaving some to drop on the floor, placing others backwards into the shelves, displacing yet others to far off shelves. What would Michael be if he didn’t partake in senseless chaos for the simple joy of it?

Some of the books caught his attention- strange, leather bound things that made him feel weird when he held them- but his attention span had been gone the moment he drank six energy drinks in a single sitting this morning, and he found himself doing little more than putting them in inconvenient places.

Michael was kicking a book under a shelf when it happened.

If he had to guess, he would’ve said it was an earthquake, but he lived far from a place where earthquakes were supposed to happen, and even in the moment he noted how the movements of the floor beneath him seemed to have an effect on the colors he saw.

Because he was Michael, he walked towards and not away from the source of the pulsing and the light. He wanted, or perhaps needed, to know what it was that was causing this.

It was very hard to look directly at the center, and it felt like something was being scraped off of him, off of the books, off of everything and whisked to some distant place behind him. Michael had no intentions to look. It felt only vaguely of walking into the wind- there was no sensation of air blowing past him. Walking was hard, certainly, but in the manner of walking up a steep hill. Only, if pressed to know what direction he was walking in, likely Michael would have answered down.

Michael wasn’t sure if time was making sense anymore. He had been walking for a while, and he was not the kind of person to wear a watch. Eventually, though, he thought he figured out what it was that the not-earthquake was trying to slice off of him. It was taking color, shards of red on his jacket stolen to whatever was behind him and replaced with an inky black that hurt to look at.

In the distance, someone yelped, though it was unclear whether it was out of pain or surprise or both. Not long after, he heard shouting voices, distorted too much for him to understand, sounding from what Michael presumed to be the epicenter. They trailed off rather quickly, leaving Michael to wonder what that meant.

Another small eternity passed, but whether or not this was because Michael himself had little grasp on time or because time was actually changing was unknown to all. That is, unknown to Michael, since the library remained as empty as always, albeit far more contorted and strange than it had been when he entered.

When he made it to the center, he was not quite sure what it was that he was seeing.

First, there was the goth, currently holding onto the rafters and clumsily trying to get his platform boots free of the hands on the neon accountant. Michael recognised the goth from many years of being in the same classes, but he had never bothered learning the other boy’s name.

Second was the neon accountant, a woman dressed in a suit and covered in colors that Michael could only describe as wrong and intrinsically painful to not only see, but experience. He described her as an accountant on behalf of her wardrobe, a spontaneous decision Michael had decided to stick to, but it was clear that whatever she was, an accountant was not it. Her hands were batting at the goth above like a cat with a ball of yarn, and she was cackling as she did it. Michael’s hair was plenty curly and long, but the accountant had long dark hair that seemed to be sharp at the ends and curls that poofed out more than seemed naturally feasible.

Third, was the thing in the center. Michael had a hard time thinking of it, all indescribable colors and shapes he could have never imagined, but the closest thing to it was probably a hole, a pit of neon. The goth hung above it, his ringed hands sounding every time he moved. The accountant was only partially out of it, though the lines where the “real world” ended and the pit began was blurry.

“Michael?” the goth called out upon noticing Michael, voice incredulous. Here, the voices were changed, with a strange echo that Michael’s ears did not agree with, but the goth’s words were understandable and for the most part, clear. Michael watched as he finally kicked himself free of the neon woman. Michael didn’t think he was yet famous, but popular was certainly a word commonly used to describe him, and it was no surprise that the goth knew he was.

“What is going on?” he asked, still standing a fair distance from the pit. He wasn’t about to walk into something he had no idea what could do to him. 

“Oh!” The accountant sounded delighted to see him. “Another one!”

He picked up a book and threw it at the accountant. Michael was a good pitcher. He had not expected Helen to move as fast as she did, and he ended up missing.

“I assure you, it’s nothing personal.” he made a show of gesturing with his hands, like he was trying to think of a word. He dragged out the pauses between his words. “You’re just stealing my colors!”

His obscenely tacky and bright wardrobe was something very dear to him and his aesthetic, and Michael wasn’t about to have some strange neoncore thing take it from him. This school only had room for one brightly colored monstrosity.

He picked up another book at random. Making sure to aim better this time, he launched this one at the woman as well.

Not long after saying this, Michael watched as the accountant turned, the pit shifting beneath her in a kaleidoscope of nonsense, and unhinged her jaw. Doing so revealed a lovecraftian horror for a mouth, circular and lined with rows upon rows of teeth that varied in size and shape.

She took the book into her mouth easily, and it was gone with a solid crunch of paper against teeth.

“Yum,” she said, her smile reaching beyond the confines of her face. Her voice hurt to hear, and hurt more to understand.

“Helpful,” the goth said, and Michael startled a little when he noticed the goth standing not five feet from him, having presumably gotten down from the ceiling while the accountant had been busing eating a book. The goth looked smaller when he was hanging from the ceiling, but now, standing next to Michael, it was clear that he was only a bit shorter than Michael. Michael felt a little better about it when he noticed the goth was wearing platforms.

“Oh, sarcasm-” Michael began to comment, but the goth didn’t respond. He was shoveling books into Michael’s arms.

“Keep Helen distracted,” he dragged Michael’s head down to his level to whisper this. Michael was not used to being manhandled. He fought the best he could with an armful of books, but ultimately he let it happen.

And with that, the goth was off running in the other direction, towards something Michael didn’t notice nor particularly care to notice.

“Helen?” he asked quietly to nobody in particular. Then, turning to the accountant, he shouted. “Helen!”

She turned, and Michael would be lying if he didn’t say that it surprised him a little to know that the goth was right.

She was laughing again.

“You know what? I’ll bite!” her smile was a glistening green, and Michael didn’t like it one bit. Her hands grew sharp blue claws, but even with his hold on reality diminishing, Michael didn’t feel any worse or different.

Michael simply did what he did best and pitched.

Helen, if that really was her name, hissed at him, and it felt like tinnitus. Michael kept throwing books at her. She kept grabbing at the edges of the pit and making noise like she was swearing but saying it incomprehensibly. Whenever she wasn’t pulling at the edges of whatever it was that she was stuck in, she was reaching out for Michael, arms extending and coming for the blond like tendrils.

Reflexes were something that Michael liked to think he had, but even then he couldn’t keep throwing things at her and evading capture forever.

“What are you doing?’ he called to the unseen goth boy. Helen was howling, a chorus of anguished wails and children crying and fire alarms, but somehow he managed to make out the goth’s voice over the din.

“Michael! It has ears. It can hear us.”

Michael hummed, not like the goth could hear him. “Fair enough,” he muttered, once again unconcerned as to if the goth would actually hear him or not.

One of Helen’s hands made a snapping gesture. The noise resembled snapping in no way and if Michael was being honest, was slightly nausea-inducing.

“Oh right!” Helen stopped making so much noise as she spoke. She retracted her hands from where they were with Michael, back to her body where they regained semi-normal proportions. She clapped them together as she forced her body to turn within the pit, obviously with effort. The clap sounded like cymbals and made Michael feel like the air within the cymbals.

“The other!” Helen chimed gleefully. She spared one more look at Michael “Well, it’s been fun Michael, but I have someone else to be dealing with now.”

Michael sighed. “Finally, you leave me alone,” he announced, loud as usual.

Now that Helen was no longer screaming in sixty sounds at once, Michael’s words carried farther. The goth responded almost instantly.

“Michael!” he yelled. “The fuck is going on?”

A small laugh escaped from Michael. “Right. Keep her distracted.”

He stood, surveying the area around him. He cupped his hands around his mouth to shout, not like he would be needing it. “I seem to have run out of books. So, alas, I must be going-”

Michael turned, and was faced with a swirling mess of distant blue and grey, not unlike the pit, but accompanied with a feeling of foreboding and dread. Every nerve and instinct Michael possessed did not want to go through that.

“Ah, nevermind!” he called again. 

Clambering clumsily onto a bookshelf, he found that while the goth was still out of sight, obscured by the sheer number of books and shelves this library had, at least there were more books for him to throw at the brightly colored eyestrain of an accountant that had not moments ago, been terrorizing him with something like seven arms and what was probably a very spiky tongue.

There was something wrong with the shelves. They were long and warped, in endless rows that faded to obscurity at the edges of Michael’s sight. In the center, Helen and her pit. Granted, he hadn’t been in many libraries before, but surely this wasn’t common for them.

He went to jump off of the shelf, but instead of landing gracefully on the ground as he had wanted to, he sprawled face first, the shelf toppled with him and a significant amount of books buried beneath.

Laid out on the ground, he realised that slowly but surely, everything of color was turning to shades of black and white. There was still some color left- a good amount of his hair was still blond- but more and more shards of color were being taken.

He hadn’t been keeping track of it before, but he was noticing now, when more and more colors were splitting off, often with a scratching feeling he didn’t enjoy. He didn’t like this, and he didn’t like how it had taken him so long to notice that it had gotten worse, but he had had more pressing matters. Things tend to get put on the back burner when giant neon claws are snaking at you constantly and threatening to eat you from little mouths along the sides of each finger.

It took a little bit of running and a good amount of throwing to get Helen’s attention diverted. Michael was close enough that he could see the goth now, knelt over a pile of leather books that were rapidly greying.

Helen’s head turned, though, a full 180 degrees and then some, her neck twisted and showcasing her lack of bones. Her body didn’t move, but her arms flipped in nonexistent sockets to reach for Michael. Hands that felt like metal pressed grooves into his shoulders and shoved him to the ground, but not before pushing him through an entire shelf of books. 

Her head came for him next, still moving separately from the body, neck extending and trailing on the ground with waves like a snake. Her face lengthened when it got close to Michael, eyes folding inwards and mouth widening as the upper jaw took up space and the lower jaw stayed put.

Then she screamed, the sound like nails on a blackboard. Michael couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but he got the gist of it. 

She was not pleased with the way things were going, she hated him for messing with her, and she didn’t like the way he reacted to her.

Michael had always liked the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

He laughed, the sound discordant and awful by its own nature. Michael didn’t know what she was asking, or even if it was a question at all, but he knew his answer.

“No!”

The laughter that followed out of Helen’s face, now rearranged to be vaguely human, was blatantly forced. The hands on Michael’s shoulders tightened.

“You’re an interesting one,” Helen said. Her voice echoed in Michael’s head whether he wanted it to or not. “What. Is. Wrong. With. You.”

Flashing a grin, Michael moved to yell at the goth, but Helen to a stop to that fast.

Colors were being taken from him more violently now, and even Michael had the very beginnings of fear creeping into him.

Conveniently, right as Helen edged closer to him with her new face, a shifting spiral of flesh and organs, a boom sounded from where the goth had been.

All at once, Helen’s limbs and neck went back to whence they came from, and Michael was released. Of course, Michael immediately followed, eager to see what it was that was drawing her attention.

It was the goth, of course, now floating above the pit, arms extended in front of him, a book floating in front of him, and his eyes a glowing green. Michael couldn’t prove that it wasn’t just the goth being a goth, but it seemed like everything about him- minus his eyes- was completely greyscale.

In the pit, in a form that was the closest to human she had been yet, was Helen, arms over her head, screaming in the way people would.

The goth was saying something, there was no doubt about it, but it was not anything Michael could hear. Yet Michael remained quiet, watching. He had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Once again, time passed strangely, and it was both forever and no time at all for the goth to finish speaking in his silent words. Helen shrank, still screaming, still human in shape, until the pit folded in on itself and the nonsense imploded upon itself.

The goth’s eyes went back to brown the moment the pit returned to being floor again. Michael entertained the idea of swooping in and catching him, but in the moments of deliberation and thinking about it, the goth had already fallen and hit the ground with a solid noise that didn’t sound very good for the goth.

Shards of color were still missing, and the bookshelves remained puzzling corridors Michael couldn’t understand, but at least the accountant and her pit were gone.

Decision made, albeit late, Michael was in the process of running for him when the second not-earthquake happened.

-

Gerry awoke first and he awoke violently, his eyes burning, book (#101) still open on his face, and a good amount of him aching from what he could only assume was his fall. Despite the pain, he was up quickly, and even through cloudy and green-tinted vision, he could see that the state of the library was not a good one.

He found Michael easily, his large form sprawled out on the floor face down not ten feet away.

Gerry hit him with (#101).

Michael did not wake with the same violence Gerry woke with, but rather with a groan and then pulling himself off the linoleum floor like he had been stuck to it.

“What the fuck happened?” he asked once back on his feet, back to towering over Gerry and running his hands through tangles in his hair.

“Well, Michael, a lot of things happened.”

“How descriptive. At least our colors are back.” 

Everything was still green colored to Gerry.

“What about our colors?”

“Helen was taking our colors.” Michael said it like it was common information. “Cracking it off of everything, piece by piece.” 

Gerry remembered this dimly. He hadn’t had much time to observe what Helen was doing when he was frantically looking through (#101) for what Sims had to say about closing doors and folding pits.

“And it’s back now?”

Michael gestured at the mess surrounding them. “How long do we have until this is noticed?”

The mess was one hell of a mess. Solid chunks of shelving were missing where the pit had been, jagged edges making it look like something had chewed the missing pieces off. Many shelves that had been once full were now empty, the books long lost to Helen and the pit. Michael had single handedly gotten rid of shelves’ worth of books, and they were large shelves, eight layers high and longer than Michael was tall. Multiple shelves had fallen during the second not-earthquake, but one was smashed and ruined worse than the rest. Gerry didn’t bother to ask.

“Not long. We need to get going.” Gerry picked up his things and forced them into his bag uncaringly, before slinging the bag over a single shoulder in yet another display of blatant apathy towards his schoolwork.

“The side door, I presume?”

Gerry nodded and in silence, they made their way out the heavy doors and into the adjacent staircase.

The stairs weren’t long, but it was enough time for Michael to begin talking again.

“Not going to explain what just happened?”

Gerry did his best to hush him as they stepped outside. No one went behind the school, at least not at this part where all there was was overgrown bushes and hard concrete. It was maybe five feet of space from the door to the barbed wire fence.

“I never got your name.”

“Gerard Keay,” Gerry answered on instinct. He recovered, though poorly. “But my friends, they would call me Gerry.”

“Would?” Michael was smiling as he said it, and Gerry didn’t answer him.

Gerry picked a direction and began walking. Michael trailed behind, his shadow strangely upsetting to see in the corners of one’s vision and his footsteps oddly silent.

“Gerry. Gerry,” Michael said, and Gerry tensed. “Whatever happened here, I have decided is unimportant.”

“No, actually it’s rather-” Gerry tried to correct him, but Michael talked louder than him.

“I am going to try very hard to forget this happened.”

“I won’t be doing that,” Gerry was still holding (#101), he realised, and he stopped to put it away in his bag before his return to the sight of the public. To his surprise, Michael stopped as well.

“Now why would you do that? Why remember when you could not?”

“I have answers, Michael.”

“And I don’t want them, Gerry.”

Gerry sighed and Michael chuckled. They made two consecutive rights and found themselves at the edge of a small crowd of passersby. Michael made to go, but Gerry grabbed his arm.

“I’m going to figure this out, one way or another, with or without you. I’ll be back here in a week, maybe 2 am?” Gerry pointed at the upper story of the library for emphasis.

“And I won’t be.” Michael was smiling again, all pointy teeth and glinting eyes.

“Well, have fun then.” Gerry let go of the other’s arm.

“Oh, I will,” Michael said, and left.


	2. dont know shit about libraries

Technically, it hadn’t been a full lie when Gerry had said that he had the answers. He had answers, but they were few and far in between.

Well into (#101) had been two pages of what Gerry had assumed to be poetry, one labelled OUT and another labelled IN.

OUT had been before IN by about ten pages, and when Gerry started reading it, he couldn’t do anything but read it aloud. Unlike IN, it hadn’t made his vision go green, it hadn’t made him hover, but as he was forced to keep reading, he had known that it meant nothing good.

It was only after Helen had emerged, cackling and too bright to look at that Gerry noticed that the pages between OUT and IN were ten or so pages of unreadable scrawl interspersed with the jagged handwriting of Sims, usually spelling out curses and curse words.

And then there was the matter of IN, which was written in Gerry’s own handwriting.

The books had been unnerving before, but little had compared to finding whole pages written in his own handwriting. Not to mention the fact that reading a part of (#101) had caused some horrible thing to rise up from the library floor.

Gerry had a good amount of answers.

The thing was named Helen. It was a form of something nasty from a world beyond his. OUT had brought it out, and IN had put it back in.

OUT had been too dangerous to leave around, so Gerry had carefully taped a piece of dark black construction paper over it. (#101) hadn’t been too helpful in telling Gerry what he could do to protect himself, and even though he’d also brought (#20) with him, he highly doubted whatever was in them would give him much edge over Helen or something similar. He’d also decided to bring a physical weapon to defend himself, just in case. His house was plenty full of weapons to pick from. The pipe wasn’t his first choice, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Many books had talked of various cases of various forms of things like Helen, but few of them had done more than tell tales about the horrible things that they did. 

(#101), though, had many handy answers about what Helen was- a thing from the Other, as Sims described it. A thing that loved inciting chaos and was looking to branch out into other universes. And yet, Gerry couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing pieces to the puzzle. He wanted to know more. 

His curiosity was so, that at 2:15 in the morning a week after the incident, Gerry was not home where his horrible mother was, not home sleeping, but rather picking the lock to the stairwell of the school library. 

The past week or so had been spent neglecting his schoolwork even more than usual, not that his mother cared in the slightest. Instead, it had been day after day of staying up nights reading the Archives books until he passed out, usually on top of the novels and around dawn. Not that all the reading had done him much good.

Helen wasn’t the only thing from the Other that he had read about-they were widespread phenomena, cataloged in minute detail in some places and barely intelligible in others.   
The books had mentioned nothing of Helen being in Gerry’s school library. It gave him no information on how to get rid of her and/or send her back to the Other. 

As a matter of fact, every time Gerry got about a third of the way through the book, though never at the same points, he would no longer be able to read it. Sometimes the words would devolve into an alphabet that Gerry and the internet’s combined efforts were useless against. Sometimes Gerry would get a splitting migraine- once, bad enough that he ended up unconscious, managing the most sleep he’d gotten all week, a solid 7 hours. And Gerry would never forget the time he tried to focus on the words only to get green static in his vision. He’d had to spend the rest of his night staring out through darkness at faraway trees and close-up books in order to regain normal vision.

Michael was not in the library when Gerry arrived, but that was to be expected. No doubt he was enjoying his sleep while Gerry broke into their school. He and Gerry did not run in the same social circles in the slightest, and the two hadn’t so much as spoken. Not about what happened last week, not about anything.

The school had felt the earthquake, it turned out, although on a much smaller scale than Gerry remembered it being. Other parts of the school had suffered minor damages, and as such the destruction of parts of the library had been written off as weird but not unnatural.

The librarian, one James Wright, was known to spend most of his time in his office or out on long lunch breaks, and never in the actual library. He relegated all of his tasks to a student assistant. Unfortunately for the library and those who frequented it, that assistant was Elias Bouchard, a laid-back stoner of a kid with nothing better to do and yet no will to do any of it.

When Gerry got up to the second floor and turned the lights up, it was clear that Elias had done almost nothing to clean up the mess Michael and Helen had made.

A small section of shelves seemed to have been righted, but there were still piles of books strewn around, many of which Gerry could tell were the leather bound Archives books.

Truth be told, he wasn’t sure what exactly it was that he was going to do.

He’d put off coming up with a plan, telling himself that he’d make it up as he went along. But now, standing in the midst of overturned library shelves and a bag full of Archives books in hand, he had absolutely no fucking clue what he was doing.

Lacking anything better to do, he found his way to where Helen had emerged, though not without effort. It was hard to keep track of anything once you went into the library- probably why he so often showed up to class late. Too much time in the huge, creepy, confusing school library.

Sitting dead centre of what had once been an indescribable neon pit, Gerry did the only thing he could even do. He read.

Not OUT or even IN- he wasn’t completely stupid- but rather a few sections from (#20), another Sims book. Sims had been confusing in (#20) when Gerry had first read it, maybe a year ago, and the book was confusing now. Some things managed to get even more confusing- for example, while Gerry remembered blank pages and ripped out sections from his last read, this time the book seemed whole. 

Gerry had skimmed (#20) last night, and there didn’t seem to be any other pages of ‘poetry’ within it- it was safe. 

He was maybe 20 minutes into reading what had once been blank pages when he heard the tapping noises. At first, it hadn’t been particularly noticeable, just a light tapping sound coming from somewhere nearby, easily dismissed. But it had gotten louder and more persistent over time, and eventually it was enough of a nuisance that Gerry stopped reading to find out the source. Looking around, there wasn’t really anything that could explain it in sight, and he was left confused as to what could be making the incessant scratching noises.

With horror, he realised that the tapping noise was coming from beneath him. He looked down and found that the floor had been replaced by a multicolored glass. Well, likely it wasn’t glass, but it sure looked it. Beneath the ‘glass’ was a grinning Helen, its smile wrapping around its head, the teeth sharp and long. Gerry screeched as he backed away, quite nearly tripping a few times. Platforms weren't the best things to run in.

Turning, he was relieved to see that the strange fog blocking his and Michael’s exit last time, and he ran the best he could, as far as he could. He brought the books with him, of course, but he kept the pipe extra close to him and ready.

He was most of the way to the stairs when he heard footsteps behind him.

Gerry turned violently to find a short boy, maybe a year younger and a foot shorter, best described as a bow tie away from looking like a nerd stereotype.

In his surprise, Gerry quite nearly hit him with the pipe.

“Well, this is unexpected.”

The guy chuckled nervously. “I’m Jonathan Sims. I- I, must’ve fallen asleep here studying. Finals are coming up, and all that. It’s not like Wright actually checks if the library’s empty when he leaves for the day. I woke when I heard this screeching noise? Uh, so, what are you doing here? It’s… 2 in the morning.”

Gerry suppressed the surprise and mild paranoia that came from hearing Jonathan’s last name. Sims couldn’t be all that uncommon of a last name, and while there was a bit of him that was excited to know a Sims, most of Gerry had it chalked up to coincidence. 

Was it really finals season already? Time had lost a good amount of its grip on Gerry this past week or so and he would not be surprised if he showed up next week to finals and failed them.

“If you must know, I’m looking into something, and it's far easier to do without the threat of faculty poking around.”

When Gerry didn’t say anything more, Jonathan laughed nervously again.

“What’s with the, uh, pipe?”

“Y’know. Precautions, and all that.”

“Cool.”

As he still had no idea what it was he was doing, Gerry only continued to stare blankly at the shelves in the distance, thinking.

“Can I ask what you’re doing?” Jonathan asked after a bit of silence.

“I guess.” Gerry pointed to the distance, in the vague direction of Helen and its pit. “Big neon thing came out of there a week ago, you know, when the earthquake happened. Freaked the shit out of me. I’m trying to figure out why.”

Jonathan scoffed. "I'm sure it did."

Gerry stood. “Okay. Want me to show you?”

Jonathan shifted a little as he spoke. “No, it- it’s fine.”

“Really?”

“It’s like a maze in there. I walked all over trying to get out.” Jonathan pointed to the shelves, turned at strange angles, some empty and other chock full. “If there was anything in there, I would’ve seen it.”

Gerry raised an eyebrow, but didn’t push it.

“It happened, Jonathan. It really did.”

“Jon,” Jon corrected. “And there’s no evidence. All we have is your account, which is hardly credible. Any number of other reasonable explanations could explain what you saw. LSD, perhaps-”

“You know who you talk like?” Gerry said. He reached into his bag and pulled out (#101), opening it to a random page. “Sims.”

“I am Sims,” Jon said as he took the book and began to read.

“Yeah, I know, same last name, but I highly doubt this person is you.” Gerry made a show of looking Jon up and down.

“Um, actually,” Jon turned the book around to show Gerry. “This is my handwriting. I think this Sims may actually be me.”

“Oh, you’re kidding me.”

“What.”

Gerry plucked the book from Jon’s hands and flipped to IN. “That’s my handwriting. Guess we’re both in these books.”

“I- I don’t remember writing those.”

“Yeah,” Gerry chuckled darkly. “Neither do I.”

“I could help you research?” Jon suggested.

“Really?” Gerry didn’t bother trying to hide his skepticism. “Didn’t you just say that my story is a load of horseshit?”

“I mean, it’s my name and handwriting in those books. I’m tied to them, somehow. I want to know what that means.”

“Yeah. Same.” Gerry put away (#101) and began walking towards the piles of spilled books. “But it is, what, 2 in the morning? If your parents are worth anything, they’re probably worried crazy.” 

Jon just shrugged. “You’re not going yet?”

“Going to check out these books. Some of these are Archives books.” He held up a new one from the closest pile. This one read (#1) on the front, and Gerry knew he would be spending the rest of his night dissecting it. “Leather. Engraved number on the front, word Archives written in confusingly beautiful calligraphy on the inside cover.” 

“Are there any more of them written…”

“In your name and handwriting? Many. Over ten, I think.”

Jon muttered something Gerry didn’t catch but was pretty sure was a curse. He went silent after, and Gerry continued to sort through the books in relative peace.  
Gerry didn’t realise Jon had left until he returned. Jon was carrying a heavy-looking bag on his shoulder, and the contents made shuffling noises as he shifted his weight.

“I, uh, didn’t get your name.”

“Gera- Gerry.” At least he was getting better at saying the correct name. “Keay.”

“Well, Gerry, uh, here’s my email.”

Gerry took the piece of paper but didn’t look at it, instead shoving it into a random pocket to read later. Jon kept talking.

“We should meet up and try to- to figure this out.”

“Yeah. We should.”

Gerry didn’t notice when Jon left, but he noticed when the sound of scraping grew loud enough for him to hear it clear across the library. (#1) was put away into his bag immediately- Wright wouldn’t notice a book missing, and Elias wouldn’t care- and (#20) was taken out.

Reading more of it seemed like a bad idea, just in case reading more would make the situation worse. He still had (#101) on him, but he wasn’t sure if IN would work when OUT hadn’t even been read.

Beginning to panic slightly, Gerry opened (#20), found the pages he had most recently read, and ripped them out. For a moment, there was quiet, and Gerry was allowed a moment of relief. Then the scratching started up again, more persistent and angry, too, and Gerry cursed.

He looked at (#20) and sighed. There was only one other thing he could think of.

“What’s the best way to destroy a book?” he muttered to himself as he made his way down the stairs. Gerry didn’t particularly want to destroy an Archives book, especially one that had pages upon pages of information he had yet to uncover. And yet, ‘eaten by neon Other he let out’ wasn’t an obituary description he liked the sound of.

For what it was worth, he tried smashing the book with the pipe, but alas, it was not meant to be.

Gerry was close to going home and stealing one of Mary Keay’s many knives to try and cut up the book with, when he remembered Elias.

Skidding as he ran madly through the marginally more organised ground floor, Gerry could only hope that Elias lived up to his reputation. 

He did. Under a desk was a shiny silver-coloured lighter with a spider decal on it, and Gerry took it without a second thought.

The scraping noises were getting louder, less like nails on glass and more like metal on metal, and Gerry was beginning to worry a little about the people nearby waking up and discovering him.

Wright may have been hopelessly incompetent, but there were unfortunately still fire alarms and fire suppression systems in the library- Gerry could see the nozzles poking out of the ceiling. He grabbed a metal wastebasket, checked if he had the rest of his things and as many Archives books as he could grab, then made for the outside.

It was quiet outside, and dark. A minute or so was spent trying to get the lighter to work, but once he was holding a lit flame it was surprisingly easy for him to bring the book to the flame, drop (#20) in the wastebasket, and watch it burn.

Carefully, keeping an eye on the fire as he did it, Gerry crept back into the library. The lock had shut behind him when he had run out of the building, and at 3 in the morning Gerry was less than pleased to fumble his way through picking the stairwell lock.

It was clear that the noise had died down when Gerry entered the building, but he didn’t keep his hopes up. Helen and the Archives books would likely screw him over yet.  
It stayed quiet all the while it took for Gerry to get to the second floor, but all was not well when Gerry found Helen’s pit. The not-glass was still there, and beneath it, Helen, mostly obscured in multi-colour swirls, its monstrous hands pressed up the edges of the pit. No sound passed between the inside of the pit and the world in which Gerry stood, but Helen’s distorted mouth was clearly saying something, head swinging back and forth on a too-long neck like an gruesome, upside-down, grandfather clock.

Gerry couldn’t read lips, but if he had to guess, he would’ve guessed Helen was saying “Tick. Tock.” over and over again.

The book was still burning when he got back. As Gerry didn’t really see another way to go about it, he tried to hide the fire in a corner, sat down on a nearby bench, and grumbled his way through his book-burning.

“Fucking Michael. He’s probably happily asleep.”

Michael was in fact, not asleep at that fine hour in the morning, and earlier, when he had been, it had not been happy. He was nowhere near the library- a whole half an hour away, in fact, just barely within range of the school- but he was very much awake.

Not awake in the sense that he was doing anything that even remotely resembled productive, but awake in the sense that he laid contorted on his bed- feet on a windowsill, an arm under himself, the other arm holding stretched out above his face, and his head hanging off the edge- the light on, the image of Helen screaming at him still burned into his mind.

Calling it a nightmare made it sound worse than it was. Yes, Michael had spent every night since the incident waking up in paralyzing fear, but he was sure it wasn’t because of Helen. The dreams were easy enough to remember, and he had yet to feel fear while he was still experiencing them. And yet, every time, Michael woke up in the middle of the night, unable to move and terrified out of his mind.

Truthfully, the nightmares were all too familiar for Michael, but this particular brand of nightmare had left him agitated, angry, and honestly, exasperated with the pile of bullshit his life was slowly devolving into.

It had been about an hour since Michael had woken up from today’s Helen-related nightmare, and so far, like every other night before, he hadn’t been able to get himself back to sleep.

The dream of the night had been typical, just a dream of Helen sitting in a chair across from Michael, grin too wide. The room had been dark in his dream, but Michael had known she was there. Michael cringed a little as he realised that it had been happening long enough for him to classify what was typical and what was not.

He really needed this to stop. He ran on little sleep as it was, usually up by 5 but never asleep before midnight. For the last week or so, he’d only ever gotten two or three hours of sleep a night. Even he realised he couldn’t keep this up forever.

He moved to get up, hissing when he put too much weight on an arm. Being ambidextrous had plenty of perks, but this week it had meant little more than throwing out both his arms at practice every day and regretting it every single time.

Standing up, the fan whirring above his head, Michael grudgingly decided to begin his day. He had no idea what he was doing, but he was up now.

And unlike what he’d been doing for the entirety of the week prior- avoiding Keay at all costs- today he was going to find that goth and hopefully, get his life back to its normal levels of chaos and uncertainty.


	3. dont know shit about the paranormal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> martin attempts integration. gerry and michael attempt Stay Awake. jon,,,, jon gets bullied

Martin Blackwood didn’t fully know why he spent this much time with his supposed friends.

Tim was fine for the most part, he supposed, if a bit overly excitable at times, but the rest of them were little more than tolerable. Normally, Nikola’s constant energy and willingness to pick on anyone at any time earned her the spot for most annoying out of the entire friend group, but this week it had been Michael.

There was a small gap in time between when classes ended and sports practices started, and since a good amount of his friends were either on a team or lacking anything better to do, they often spent that hour loitering around campus. This week hadn’t been particularly normal, as that hour had mostly been spent watching Michael pitch himself to death, watching him complain about pitching himself to death, or as it was today, witnessing his gradual descent into madness.

“Who are we even looking for?” Jared said, but it was unlikely that he himself would be looking around. His eyes were trained on his latest wood carving as he diligently whittled at it with a contraband knife. It appeared to be a person, or at least a grotesque rendition of one with a few extra bones and far too much flesh. Martin tried to avoid looking at it. 

“Do none of you know of a Gerry Keay? Almost my height, but not quite, in platforms, looks like a hot topic model?” Michael had been walking fast before, but he stopped now, turned to face the rest. Michael was grinning, but he didn’t seem happy.

As unhinged as Michael tended to be, the Michael of late seemed to have lost the door completely.

“I know of a Gerard,” Nikola said, twisting her way in front of Michael. “But I’m not keen on finding him. He’s beneath us, Michael. Have you seen how horribly he treats his skin?”

Michael didn’t give her a response beyond a few grunts, choosing instead to drain the rest of his spiked energy drink. What exactly this school had done to deserve a caffeinated Michael was beyond Martin.

“Not everyone cares about their skin as much as you do, Nikola,” Martin sighed.

“Oh but they should! Skin is precious, Martin. Precious.”

"He's in the library," Jared interrupted, pointing a thick finger towards the building in question.

"How do you know that?" Michael asked, now staring intently at the library as if he could see through its walls.

"A tall goth with poorly-dyed black hair just walked in. Doubt this school has many of those."

"Oh, of course," Michael ran his hands through his hair with significant force. "The library."

Martin was quick to give his opinion. “Then let’s go to the library.”

Nikola’s grin was sickening, but Martin had long since gotten used to how wide Michael smiled and how Nikola grinned too many too-perfect teeth.

“Martin, don’t tell me you’re still all heart-eyes for him.” Nikola grabbed Martin by the shoulders and shook him. “Snap out of it. Library boy’s skin is in even worse condition than the goth’s. I won’t allow it.”

“He has a name, you know.” Martin managed to pry Nikola’s fingers off of him, but it took effort.

“Jonah, was it?” Nikola suggested. Jared snickered and continued the bit.

“No, I think it was Jude.” 

They knew very well who Martin was referring to. It wasn’t as if he hadn't spent the better part of two years relentlessly pining after him, much to the dismay of his entire friend group. Even Sasha, currently elsewhere for sport-unrelated extracurriculars, had expressed mild disapproval.

“His name is Jon,” Martin told them, definitely not for the first time, and watched as they all stared at him with their different but equally messed up smiles. “Are we going or not?”

“Yes,” Michael decided, and the rest followed.

The library was a monstrosity of a place, and it wasn’t long before Martin found himself separate from the rest of the group.

Wandering the second floor of the library- which looked ruined in places and merely disorganized in others- Martin found himself quickly lost to the strange order the shelves were arranged in. The shelves were seemingly designed to confuse, as they were never set parallel to one another but rather at sharp angles. Some of them opened up when you pushed at the center, revealing more shelves, tucked away like matryoshka dolls. There was no filing system after a while, just old shelves and older books. It was honestly a wonder how anyone found anything here.

It was like this, stuck in apparently endless and nonsensical corridors of shelves full with leather books with no names, that Martin heard voices. Specifically, the voice of one Jon Sims.

“Oliver, please. You know how poorly I’m doing in English.”

“Jon, I’m good at Economics. That’s what I helped you out with. You know I’m doing terrible in English,” this Oliver character replied.

“No worse than me, surely.”

“Doubt it.”

“Oliver! You said you’d help me,” Jon’s tone continued to get angrier.

“In Economics.” In opposition to Jon, this Oliver’s voice remained calm, almost bored. Martin disliked him immediately.

“You should have been more clear, before I staked the majority of my grade on you!”

Carefully, Martin maneuvered himself to a point where he could see the two. Jon was facing away from him, but the one called Oliver was facing Martin. 

Even sitting down you could tell Oliver was tall, with dark skin and blue dreadlocks that fell onto his shoulders too perfectly. He was incredibly handsome, and Martin decided he hated him.

Martin was probably staring, trying to glare Oliver to death, and it didn’t take long for Oliver to notice him. Martin tried to play it like he knew what he was doing.

“Oh. Hello.” He shifted awkwardly from his place near the shelves. He was a large presence, and he was acutely aware of it as he found his way to Jon and Oliver’s table.

“I’ve been looking for someone. Uh, Gerad Kay?”

“Gerry Keay?” Jon asked, and when he turned to look at Martin, Martin’s jaw seized up before he could stop it. Still, he forced himself to speak.

“Uh, yeah. I need to talk to him. Do you know where he is…?”

“I’m actually supposed to meet up with him soon,” Jon fixed his gaze on Martin like he could see through him. Martin was simultaneously the happiest he’d been in weeks and terrified. “Do you also know about the whole incident?”

“Yes,” Martin said, a complete lie.

Luckily for him, he didn’t have to say much more than that, because Oliver, beautifully hateable Oliver, spoke up.

“You’re being cryptic, and I have places to be.” He stood, and Martin was eager to see him gone. Today hadn’t started out great- with his mother in another one of her moods, Michael losing it, and that less than ideal maths grade- but his hopes were up on it being set to end well enough.

“You?” Jon scoffed, but his tone was teasing. “You don’t have friends.”

“Ouch,” Oliver said, but it lacked feeling. “I have a date with Graham.”

“I forget you and Folger are an item,” Jon was smiling, and Martin was trying to memorize it. He was also celebrating Oliver being taken, even if it did nothing to subdue the jealousy. “He’s so… odd.”

“He is eccentric,” Oliver corrected. “And it is sweet.”

In a moment of trying to impress Jon that he would, in retrospect, realise was out of nowhere and frankly, stupid, Martin spoke up.

“I, uh, saw Graham eat his test once,” he said, before he had fully comprehended the potential impact of what he was about to say.

“What,” Oliver said, flat. He stopped moving. It was too late for Martin to turn back now.

“I saw him eat his test once,” Martin repeated, and tried to make sure that Oliver knew that every word of the story that followed was true. “Last year, towards the end of the semester, we- we got a test back in class. It was a short one, only about three pages long, I think. I sat in the very back of class, right, and Graham, he sat at the desk in front of mine. And uh, one day, when we had gotten our test back- and he tuns around. Looks me dead in the eye. And eats- eats- his test. Slowly, deliberately, bit by bit, until it was all gone. Don’t know how Montauk didn’t notice, really.”

Oliver furrowed his brow at this, unfurrowed it, furrowed it again, opened his mouth to speak, said nothing, and left.

“That was certainly a story,” Jon said, and Martin was suddenly hit with the ramifications of telling that tale in front of his crush.

“I-I swear it’s true,” Martin said, and for once he wasn’t lying. It had been one hell of a thing to witness.

Awkwardly, Martin shuffled his way to the seat opposite where Oliver had been sitting. He had no idea what he meant to do, but he never really did anyway.

“So-” he began.

“Martin!” Someone yelled, and Martin cringed at the sudden noise.

“Uh, Nikola!” Jon said, startled. “You, you spooked me.”

“That was the point.” She turned to Martin. “Of course you snuck off with library boy.”

Martin made a noise. “He knows… Jerry.”

“Oh, a friend of Gerard! I didn’t know those could exist.”

“Nikola,” Martin said, but she was already leaving. 

“I’ll get Michael!” she called, almost in song, and then she was gone, lost to the library.

Martin made an annoyed hum as Nikola left.

“Sorry, she’s… a bit much,” Martin apologised, but Jon was already back to staring intensely at his homework.

“Are you any good at English, by any chance?” Jon tapped his papers.

Martin shrugged. “I like to think I’m pretty good. I write, uh poetry.” He could feel his face flush as he spoke and he clammed up.

“Never been one for poetry, myself,” Jon said. “But at this point I’ll accept any help I can get. I’m a terrible writer.”

-

It was when he ran into the third dead-ending path of shelves on the first floor that Michael fully remembered why he didn’t usually go into the school library. Normally, he had enough in him to realise that a labyrinth full of books he didn’t care about and people he didn’t like was not a good place to get lost in, but sleep deprivation had his memory completely shot. 

“I am going to-” Michael started, only to have someone tap on his shoulder. “The fuck?”

“Lost?” the voice said. Unfortunately for Michael, a sweep of his clawed nails failed to hit anything. “Christ. Relax, Michael.”

At first glance, the guy didn’t look like much. He was short, even taking into consideration Michael’s height, and looked as if he’d been manhandled into clothes too large and fancy for him. Despite his size, he looked old. Not quite old enough to be automatically assumed to be a teacher, but he didn’t seem to be of student age, either. His expression remained a lazy grin, and his eyes reddish. Something about him smelled.

It was possible that Michael knew him, but today he had zero recollection of who he was talking to.

Michael pointed at the joint trapped between the guy’s fingers. “You’re smoking.”

“Yeah. I’m allowed to.”

“Can I-” Michael began, but was once again cut off.

“Absolutely not.” The guy took a long drag, clearly doing it to spite Michael. “Now, are you lost or not?”

Michael shrugged. “This library is horrible.”

“I’m aware.” He gestured at the long corridor of books surrounding them. “So, Michael. Where are you going?”

“Trying to find Gerry Keay,” Michael said immediately, before he could process it.

The guy hummed as he raised the joint back to his lips. “Alright.”

He turned, revealing a side path out of the corridor of shelves that Michael must have missed. 

“There you go,” the guy said cryptically. “Two lefts. Don’t mess up.”

“Two lefts,” Michael repeated on instinct. “Got it.”

Michael went forwards a few steps before stopping.

“Wait, who are you?” he called as he turned, but he only found empty air. “Weed guy?”

The long corridor was empty as far as he could see.

Michael combed his hands through his hair, twisting it occasionally. “Always fun when that happens.”

After a moment he started forwards, taking the first left when it showed up. The shelves here were more organized than elsewhere, he realised. Stranger than that was how they were mostly empty. Granted, Michael hadn’t been in the library often, and he was pretty out of it right now, but he was sure the rest of the library had shelves all but overflowing with books. Something set him on edge, and maybe it was the caffeine, but for once the adrenaline felt like anxiety instead of excitement.

“Don’t be a hallucination,” Michael said when he saw Nikola walking towards him.

“You’re hallucinating again?” Nikola asked, and Michael could only laugh.

“Unimportant. Have you found anything?”

“Martin, in a surprising twist of events, has a lead.”

“Martin?” Michael asked, but Nikola was already moving back to wherever she had come from.

The second left took them back into the nonsense patterns of shelves, and Michael was somehow comforted by it. At least here the strangeness was consistent.  
Nikola disappeared behind a turn at some point, but Michael didn’t bother trying to track her down. Whatever she was doing, it didn’t concern him, and if it did, he’d simply deal with it later.

When he finally happened across an open area, he was disappointed to find an absence of Gerry at the table. Martin was there, because of course he was, and across from him was some kid. Michael didn’t recognise him, and he didn’t care.

He approached the unfamiliar kid.

“Martin, who is this? What is this? Why is this?”

“Which do you want an answer to?” Martin replied bluntly.

“Jonathan Sims,” the kid said, and stuck out a hand for Michael to shake. 

Michael took the hand and crushed it until the kid cringed in pain and withdrew. “I won’t remember your name.”

“He knows Gerry,” Martin explained.

“Oh!” Michael dragged the kid out of his chair. “Do you now?”

“Hey!” Martin protested, though Michael had already let go of the kid. It really wasn't the sort of day for beating up random people. Intimidating whoever this was, though- that could be amusing.

“Library boy, I see.”

“Please don't,” Martin mumbled, to no avail.

“You know Gerry?” Michael asked. He wanted to dangle the kid by his long hair and maybe shake him a little, but his arms were positively ruined from over exertion and he didn’t quite think he could handle it. 

He settled for leering over him.

“Vaguely?” the kid said. “I only met him a few days ago. But I guess I know him?”

“I guess?” Michael pried.

“I- sure.”

“Are you sure, though?”

“I… I suppose. I know Gerry.”

“Final answer?”

“Final answer.”

A little ways away, Martin groaned.

“Wrong answer!” Michael giggled, and it was like breaking glass. He was going to enjoy this. “How can you be sure that you know him? How can you know that what you see of him is the true him? Or guess, really. Those were your words, weren’t they? ‘I guess?’ Cute.

“Let’s go a bit, ah, deeper, shall we? Do you know him, Jan? Was that your name? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does, you see? You think you know this thing you see as Gerry. You perceive a goth, what, twice your height?” Michael cackled something nasty before continuing.

“You perceive him: sarcastic, strange, obsessed with books. But is he real? Is that goth you see Gerry, or is it some deep perversion of the mind, a construct for a façade as your subconscious screams, aware of your false reality but helpless to your own delusions? 

“Can you prove his existence? Can you prove mine?”

Michael laughed a grating, piercing noise. “Can you prove your own?”

-

“Michael,” Someone said, and Martin turned away from Michael’s continuing torment of Jon to see a tall goth holding a pile of books.

This must be Gerad.

“That’s enough,” the goth said.

Michael stopped talking almost immediately, his face newly contorted into some horrible conglomeration of a scowl and a grin. He poked at Jon’s forehead with an exceptionally long fingernail like he meant to stab the shorter boy. 

“This was getting boring. Glad you decided to show!” Michael called as he turned away from Jon.

Michael moved towards Gerry, hands and fingernails spiraling and twisting like he meant to carve Gerry up.

Gerry somehow managed to look dismayed while grinning. He grabbed Michael’s wrist to keep the blond’s nails from reaching him. There was a small struggle that followed where neither spoke. It wasn’t much, consisting mostly of Michael reaching for Gerry and Gerry doing his best to block Michael’s hands while also holding a large amount of books. 

Jon had returned to the table and sat down, noticeably even more tired. 

“Your friends are horrible,” he said. Martin mumbled something incoherent in response.

Gerry raised a pierced eyebrow at Michael. “Aren’t you the one who didn’t show up?”

“What, to your little break-in? I told you, Gerry. I was never going to go to that. Can’t stand someone up if you never agreed to show in the first place.”

“Break in?” Martin asked, but he was expecting to be ignored.

Gerry didn’t respond to either Michael or Martin. He shoved Michael a little and moved past him, Michael’s upper half bending backwards and then back up, the rest of him static like he was a wobbly man. When Gerry spoke again, it was to Jon.

“I’m going to be honest. I didn’t expect half the school to be around when you said we could meet here for our research project. Instead it’s a recruitment for the world’s worst boyband.”

“Hey,” came a voice from above, and Martin jumped a little when Nikola’s pink hair fell into his face. She was perched on a bookshelf like a gargoyle, at a perfect height for her to make grabs at Martin’s glasses. “I want in on the band. I can play the organ, you know.”

“Nikola, there is no band. And, from personal experience- those shelves don’t hold up long,” Michael said. 

“But, if there was a band, we’d have you playing the organ,” Martin added quickly.

“I would expect nothing less.” Nikola grinned, still on the shelf, still a gargoyle, clearly ignoring Michael’s warnings.

“I’m… not sure where the other people came from. They just sort of showed up, really. But Martin here knows about it. He says you told him?” Jon ignored Nikola and Michael, which was the proper decision.

Gerry narrowed his eyes at Martin, but ultimately shrugged. “Might have. Honestly, I don't remember much these days. Haven’t been sleeping much.”

“Same,” Michael echoed, quiet for him, but still louder than he really should be.

Gerry dropped his books onto the table loudly. 

“Did you have to invite half the school here?” He gestured at Nikola. “Does she know?”

Jon shook his head.

Gerry waved a hand in her general direction. “Then kindly get gone.”

Nikola smiled horribly back. When she spoke, her voice dripped with overdone sweetness. “No.”

She jumped off the shelf, and for a moment the floor rattled with the sudden impact. Nikola moved for Gerry, but Michael got in the way. He moved in front of Nikola, putting his hands on either side of her face so that they encompassed most of her head. 

“I, for one, second the idea that you get gone.”

Either Gerry wasn’t paying attention, or he simply didn’t care, because he ignored them completely, instead falling onto a chair and then face-planting into his pile of books unceremoniously.

Nikola hissed at Michael. “I’m going to find out, Michael. I will be privy to your little secrets!”

She lunged past Michael, who despite being bigger was not faster. Martin let out a yelp at the sudden movement, and Jon’s pencil made a horrific scratching noise when he suddenly dragged it across half the page. Gerry might’ve actually been asleep.

Halfway to the table, though, she stopped and turned.

“Michael... “ she asked, her head at a tilt just shy of unnatural. “Where’s our pet meatbag?”

“I’m not Jared’s keeper, Nikola. Where do you think?”

Nikola made an exceedingly unpleasant noise. “I will peel your skin off, Michael, and I will wear it like my own. It is then, in your identity, that I will ruin every little piece of your sad, pathetic excuse of a life, so that even in death your existence is reduced to the rubbish it always was and forgotten like it always should’ve been.” 

Nikola walked backwards into the shelf maze with a glare, and Michael blew a kiss back at her as she left. 

Jon stared. Gerry kept napping. Martin, long used to Nikola’s dramatics, merely sighed.

It didn’t take long for the silence from Nikola’s absence to be filled.

“Gerry, Gerry, Gerry.” Michael spun his way over to the table. He grabbed at Jon’s chair, causing him to fall off as Michael stole it for himself. “So it seems more people have discovered what we’ve found, yes?”

Michael’s head swiveled to meet Martin’s eyes, and Martin felt like fading into nothingness and/or merging with the shelves. He plastered a false grin on his face and gathered together the same amount of shaky pseudo-confidence he usually maintained so well.

“Gerry?” Michael poked at Gerry’s form, sighing when a finger got entangled in the badly-dyed mess of black hair on the goth’s head. The finger was yanked out with gusto, and suddenly Gerry Keay was awake, and also screaming.

“Does no one realise we are in a library?” Jon muttered, in a new chair, still erasing the horrible mark he had made on his homework a few minutes prior. “Are we not supposed to be quiet in libraries anymore?”

“It is an extremely large library,” Martin said, defaulting to defending Michael by sheer habit. “And it’s not like Wright is known for anything other than dating coworkers.”

“Oh god,” Jon said. This was probably to how Gerry was hyperventilating and holding his head in his hands, but Martin liked to pretend that the things he said were of note to other people.

“He’ll be fine.” Michael rolled his eyes, the black circles that passed for iris and pupil disappearing back into his head. Martin wouldn’t be surprised if one day he found out that Michael could roll his eyes upwards until they emerged from the bottom. But Michael’s eyes came back from the top, rolling back down, right as Gerry’s violent awakening mellowed out.

“See?” Michael lifted Gerry’s head with a hand, a gesture Gerry protested greatly. “Right as day. Minus the eyebags and dark circles and… is that a bruise?”

Gerry shoved the handsy jock off of him. He then tried his hands through his hair. It was clear Gerry was trying to be able to do it absentmindedly to calm himself, but his hair was so terribly and hopelessly tangled that he only succeeded in angering himself further when his hands got stuck.

“Tangled hair. Shit grades. Nightmares. Real fun,” Gerry muttered. 

"Have you been having nightmares as well? Join the club.” Michael leaned back extremely far in his chair, his feet hooked under the desk but his arms resting above his head. “Ever since the neon lady, Gerry. I haven’t slept for more than two or three hours a night.”

Martin was thoroughly lost, but he locked down his facial expression and pretended like he had a single clue as to what was happening.

“No,” the goth said. “Just the normal kind of nightmares, where my mother forces me to help her skin herself alive so she can turn into a book. That kind of thing, yknow?”

“Wait. So I’m the only one who has been dreaming nonstop of a brightly coloured accountant from what I can only presume to be hell?”

“Accountant? That’s the horrifying thing you’re after?” Jon laughed. “An accountant?”

“Yeah,” Martin echoed. “What’s up with that?”

Gerry rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It’s a monster from the Other. Whatever it actually is, we don’t want it out here.”

“You sure?” Michael picked up a bit of Gerry’s hair and began twirling it around his finger before Gerry stopped him. “What if she’s actually, like, fun?”

“It is an eldritch being of chaos, Michael. It is certainly not fun.”

“If I was a neon eldritch being of chaos, I would be fun. And you can hold me accountable to that.”

“Was that a pun?” Martin asked.

“Yeah, no,” Gerry said. “We are not having this conversation. The nasty thing scratching at the fabric between our reality and whatever the Other is- it’s going back to the place whence it came. That’s that.”

“Buzzkill,” Michael groaned, and reached for Gerry’s hair again. “You need to comb this more, you know.”

“How?” Jon asked. “I’ve read a couple of these Archives books. They're mostly ghost stories. Supposed accounts of people running into monsters, completely void of evidence. Nothing I’ve read has… step by step instructions on ‘how to return a neon accountant to the hellscape it came from.’ Unfortunately.”

“We’ll keep digging. And worst comes to worst, the world ends. Big whoop,” Gerry said. Michael’s fingers were still in his hair, but he seemed to have given up on intervening.

“And worse,” Michael interrupted. “I get to keep having nightmares.”

“Well, Jon’s found nothing, I don’t have any new information, and Michael’s little more than a waste of table space, so that leaves,” Gerry turned to Martin. “Whoever you are."

“Martin Blackwood,” Martin explained.

“Okay. So, Martin, got any helpful information on keeping the world from ending?”

Martin would be lying if he said that he knew anything about what was happening right now.

“A bit,” he lied. He grabbed for the closest book, whose front cover labelled it as (#28). It was written in a startlingly messy font, and as he flipped through the pages, he realised it was hand-written, all of it. The tilt of some of the lines were not something he didn’t think any self respecting font, editor, author, or publisher would ever do. 

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but halfway through the book he stopped. Martin forced down his automatic reaction of expletives and delivered the reveal like he had known it all along.

“This is a story about Melanie King.”

“We know,” Gerry said.

“I’ve read it,” Jon said.

“I don’t care,” Michael said.

Martin groaned. “That’s- it’s not about the story. It’s about Melanie King.”

“What, do you know her?” Jon chuckled. “It’s about some random girl on a field trip to an abandoned hospital. And while that is a bit… odd, I admit, it still doesn't mean anything. I doubt she’s even real.”

“She went to our school a few years ago.”

“Really?” Gerry asked, attempting to lean over Martin to double check his findings, but held back by Michael’s hands still being in his hair.

“I knew one Melanie King, at least. Definitely. She wasn’t here long, but she stabbed a kid in the middle of class. That sort of thing leaves an impression on you.”

“What kind of classes are you being put in?” Jon muttered, just barely audible.

“Oh?” Michael said, rocketing his chair back to a normal position with resounding clatter. He leaned over the table and pointed at (#28). “See, now that’s what I call fun.”

“We don’t need to hear about your friends and their homicidal tendencies.” Gerry tapped the table with his nails to an unknown beat. “Do we have any way to find this Melanie King? Assuming that it is the same person.”

Martin shrugged. “She was expelled from here. The stabbed kid lost a kidney, so.”

“I like her already,” Michael said, already back to tilting back precariously.

“Does she still live around here?” Jon asked. “Just because she got expelled doesn’t mean she moved. There’s a couple other schools around here, right?”

“I think so? Pretty sure I saw her wandering around with some purple haired girl the other day. Looked less homicidal, I think.”

“Boring,” Michael chimed.

“Michael.” Gerry yanked a piece of Michael’s hair. “You have connections, right?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“You could find this Melanie King for us. She could be a firsthand account of dealing with something from the Other.”

“And that’s important how, exactly?” Michael said, and Gerry looked like he wanted to slap him.

“All the things from the Other are different, but they share some similarities. Melanie King watched a portal to the Other open and close. She could have extremely important information that wouldn’t have been written in the Archives books.”

“Oh, I meant to ask.” Michael crashed his chair to the ground and leaned closer to Gerry. “What are these Archives things you people keep talking about?”

“You’re kidding me,” Jon sighed. “The books?”

“I haven’t read a book in eight years, Jack, and I don’t plan on reading another any time soon.”

"It's Jon," Martin corrected.

"Sure it is. What is an Archives?"

"Well, maybe," Gerry said, "if you had stuck around for answers instead of fleeing, you would know."

"Well, I didn't. So tell me."

"Fine." Jon sighed and picked up (#28). "This is a book. You read it. With letters to represent-"

"I'm not a complete idiot, Johnathan. What about these books is important?"

“They’re a collection. All of them have the same few markings.” Gerry picked up a book from his pile and showed it to Michael, pointing out the covers, the inside covers, and the few names that seemed to pop up as the authors consistently.

“All the books under Sims are… written in my handwriting,” Jon said when Gerry had finished explaining. “I’ve not written them, at least not yet, but there they are.”

“Fascinating,” Michael replied, making a grab at the book Gerry was attempting to put back on the pile. He opened it to the inside cover and made a high pitched noise that Martin would have originally deemed impossible for humans to make. “Interesting!”

Gerry groaned. “What?”

“Guess whose handwriting is also in these ridiculous books.” Michael turned the book around for the rest to see, a long green nail tapping the Archives written in it. “It’s in all of these, and I’m sure I would remember it if I wrote them.”

“That’s your handwriting?” Gerry asked incredulously.

“It is possible that I did them all that weekend when I blacked out at Rosie’s party and woke up in Belgium with bags of sequins in my pockets, but I don’t think so. My handwriting gets to be shaky when I’m drunk.”

“That’s your handwriting?” Jon repeated.

“I don’t understand it either, but yeah,” Martin said. “Apparently he actually writes like that.”

“I blame my librarian parents completely.” Michael dropped the book and reached across the table for Jon’s pen.

“That’s my pen,” Jon said.

Michael grabbed for Gerry’s arm. “I’m going to prove my point,” he said, and began scrawling onto the goth.

“Do you have to write on me?” Gerry asked, but he let it happen.

“No, but this is more entertaining for me.” Michael threw the pen back, which clattered against Jon’s glasses before hitting the table. “See?”

Gerry’s arm was twisted around to show it off to the rest, but the neat calligraphy of Michael’s handwriting was still plain to see.

“It’s been years, and I’m still surprised every time you write,” Martin muttered.

“How did you make those intricate weighted lines on skin?” Jon held his pen up to the light like it would reveal to him secrets. “This is a ballpoint pen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gerry said. “Now we know that not only is Jon here somehow the author of many Archives books despite writing none of them, I also have a piece in my handwriting, and Michael has somehow engraved every Archives book with his extremely neat handwriting. Even though he hasn’t read a book in almost a decade.”

“My handwriting isn’t in any of the books,” Martin said.

“That’s probably a good thing.” Gerry brought his hands almost to his own hair before thinking better of it. He turned to the brightly coloured jock beside him. “Michael. Melanie King.”

Michael grinned back, silent and unrelenting.

“Do you want nightmares or not?” Gerry said.

“Alright!” Michael conceded. “I’ll see what doors I can open.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that bit about graham eating his test? happened to me. i watched a teenage girl eat her test once in the middle of class. to this day i have no explanation as to why


	4. dont know shit about motorcycle speedway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hello im alive im sorry  
> in this installment: gerry and michael track down melanie. everything goes off the rails. this chapter refuses to take itself seriously and i refuse to do anything about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also i was Not Happy with how i had written nikola so i did go back and fix some things (not important beyond me changing some "yikes!" sort of lines). i did her a disservice.

Gerry was going to be late, and he knew it from the moment when he left his mother’s house to the last few moments he was still on his bike, skidding towards the Dunes.

“You’re late,” Michael called from somewhere just above the sidewalk.

“Shut it,” Gerry said, taking precious moments away from braking to bother with the blond. 

This was a poor decision on Gerry’s part- he just barely managed to make a sharp turn and keep himself from spilling out into a ditch. He fell away from the ditch, dragging his bike up when it nearly slid into the pit, and he couldn’t help but laugh. 

It’d been a surprising few days since he’d last pulled an all-nighter, and he was beginning to think his body didn’t want him to be healthy. Just that morning, he’d cut deep into his finger on accident, and he didn’t even have the excuse of being horribly sleep deprived to explain it anymore.

Maybe he was just this clumsy always, but it wasn’t like he had much frame of reference. Now that Martin and Jon had taken all his books from him in an effort to catch up on lore, he’d been stuck with the mortifying ordeal of going to bed before midnight.

The same couldn’t be said of Michael, who had spent the last week of their meetings with Jon and Martin complaining nonstop about his nightmares and clogging up everyone's time with useless facts about baseball drama.

At least the presence of other people lessened the panic echo chamber he was used to being in. Jon only cared about what seemed most trivial, Martin worried over everything, and Michael cared about nothing. It was chaotic to hold debates of any value, but at least it was balanced.

Gerry dragged himself and his bike away from the pit, and the smile left his face when he saw Michael. He was perched on the cover of what seemed to be a mostly disused bus stop, swinging his legs and grinning like an oversized cheshire cat. Presently, he wasn’t sure what exactly it was about Michael’s face that set him on edge, only that Michael was somehow the most interesting and the most annoying person he’d ever met.

“Graceful!” Michael shouted after him, clearly having no intentions of helping. Gerry glared, and Michael only grinned back from his spot atop the cover of a bus stop.  
Finally stopped for good, Gerry produced a large u-lock from the depths of his coat and began attaching his bike to a nearby pole. Michael jumped down, but only moved enough to lean back against the sides of the bus stop.

Michael reached for Gerry’s hair immediately upon Gerry entering grabbing distance. He stopped Gerry in place to run a hand through his hair, smiling when his hands went through the goth’s hair smoothly.

“You combed it!” Michael said, his sheer glee blatant in his voice. “I’m so proud of you, thank you!”

“I didn’t do it for you, y’know.”

“Sure,” Michael said, and Gerry ignored him.

Gerry let Michael continue to run his hands through his hair. It wasn’t as much of a nuisance now that he’d managed to comb out most of the tangles, and somehow it’d become a little more than tolerable.

“Why’d you pick this place?”

This was a bit of a ways out of town, the sort of place that was just out of the way enough to not be frequented by many but close enough to not be any sort of ordeal to get to. Gerry, long since used to long bike rides, had enjoyed having to come here if only because it meant more time not spent around his mother.

“Why not?” Michael kicked at Gerry’s bike as they passed it, tipping it over. Gerry scowled as he righted his bicycle. 

He tied up his hair into a shoddy ponytail to spite Michael. 

Michael made an annoyed sound, but kept talking. “What better place to meet up than the town square?”

As per usual, Michael made no sense whatsoever. The Dunes were not any place of gathering of any sorts, unless you counted feral squirrels and various other creatures of the rabid sort. Out with his mother as she scrounged for what he had always presumed to be blood sacrifices, Gerry had seen his fill of dead and dying rodents. He found the fact that this place was one of her prime hunting spots extremely indicative of what kind of a place it was.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a town square.” 

It was little more than an open field. For reasons unknown to Gerry, the powers that were had never bothered with developing anything out here, leaving it open for the teenagers to claim as their own. Gerry had never been completely sure of what went on in the Dunes, but he’d had to tag along with his mother enough times to know that the scattered holes in the ground were more likely to be caused by explosives than children with shovels. The Dunes were named after the hills of dirt everywhere, irregular and blatantly man-made, but the sources of those were yet to be known by Gerry. The mounds of earth were huge, big enough to obscure some visibility of the rest of the Dunes, where Gerry hadn’t been often, if at all. His mother had no purpose going deeper in, and so neither did her son.

Gerry, who preferred to spend his weekends in libraries researching and hiding from his mother or holed up in thrift stores and hiding from his mother, did not personally get why anyone would feel drawn to hang out at the Dunes, but he had to accept it as fact. 

He didn’t like crowds- too many eyes out there- and while the Dunes supposedly had proper crowds only on rare occasions, there were certainly the possibility of people being around. They were meant to be meeting with Melanie today to discuss Helen and the Other, and Gerry was less than excited at the prospect of holding such conversations where others could hear.

“The Dunes, town square, same thing, is it not?” Michael grabbed Gerry by the arm and began moving at a fast pace. “Let’s go meet some people. Melanie will be here when she’s here. ”

“You’re kidding,” Gerry said, but he was dragged to a small group of Michael’s friends nevertheless. “Where even are Martin and Jon?”

Michael ignored him. He gestured to his friends with the grin of a child displaying to their parents their collection of favourite stuffed bears. 

Gerry recognized none of them.

“Michael!” someone with dyed blond hair shouted as they approached. He dragged Michael in for what Gerry guessed to be a bro hug.

“Oh, you brought him!” someone else said, and Gerry briefly had trouble reconciling Michael’s overwhelming personality with this new person’s kind demeanor, before remembering that nothing that dealt with Michael had ever made sense.

“Tim, and Sasha!” Michael said, first gesturing to the blond and then to the shorter one. Gerry introduced himself in return.

“Oh, we’re aware,” Tim said, chuckling. “You’re a memorable character.”

Gerry had his doubts.

“That, and Michael went crazy trying to find you not too long ago.” Sasha poked at Michael. Michael didn’t retaliate, to Gerry’s neverending surprise.

“He is. Obsessed,” Tim added, staring a little. “I sort of get it.”

“He blames me for his nightmares,” Gerry replied, deadpan.

“It is your fault,” Michael said. “But that’s not important right now. Just… enjoy the show.”

“What show?”

Tim wiggled his eyebrows. “Wait. Sasha’s going to be amazing.” He gestured to one of the dunes of dirt. 

“Come along,” Sasha said, hooking an arm around Gerry’s. Michael took the other arm, and Gerry was brought deeper into the dunes, and then down a ways into a lowered area of the Dunes. He had the harrowing thought of ending up like his mother’s captured rodents in the hands of these people. This would certainly be the place to do it in.

This place was a valley of dirt, going down maybe twenty feet at a slope before going flat, and though Gerry could see the matching slope across the valley, it seemed to be at much steeper an angle than where they were now. It was some sort of dried-out pool, remade, and Gerry was a little taken aback by its existence.

“Y’know, I didn’t know this even existed,” he said as Michael pulled him down the steep sides and seated him on crudely carved steps. Sasha had split from him at some point, now further down into the little valley with Tim.

“Kill ‘em out there,” Gerry heard Tim say, and Sasha chuckled.

“I’m not going to kill them,” she replied. “But I will win.”

Michael spoke up before Tim had even made to return.

“Oh, but of course!” One of Michael’s hands wrapped around the far side of Gerry’s head in indication for Gerry to turn. Gerry turned, and somehow Michael’s grin widened more. Gerry noted, not for the first time, the almost cartoon points of his incisors.

“Rise, Gerry! I have to point out the contestants,” Michael insisted, standing quickly. His hand stayed on Gerry’s face until Gerry finally stood, and then the hand finally dropped.

Now that he was thinking about it, it seemed like the valley was a circle- a track of some sorts had been carved into the ground. He doubted it was Michael and his lot that had done it, but someone had obviously intended for this to be some sort of an arena.

There wasn’t much of a crowd around them, and the place was large enough that the people had spread out to the point where it was just shy of feeling barren. If Gerry had bothered to count, he would’ve noticed upwards of 100 people present at the tracks, but his attention was elsewhere.

Down, where Sasha was, was an orderly row of six motorbikes, all uniquely decorated to varying extents. So far, there seemed to be only a few people near the bikes, Sasha included, and no one had gotten on any of them yet. Gerry didn’t recognise most of the people there, but it was hard not to recognise the bright pink hair of Nikola Grimaldi-Orsinov. She was brightly colored and mildly bedazzled, decked out in what seemed to be a holographic version of vintage ringmaster’s clothes. She stood in the centre of the track, leaning against a very large flag, and even from here Gerry knew she was busy poking fun at the riders.

“What the fuck is this?” Gerry laughed. “This is insane.”

“It is like nothing else, isn’t it?” Michael got a fingernail under Gerry’s hair band and snapped it. Gerry had plenty of others in his coat, but the prospect of letting Michael systematically destroy so many good hair bands was not a prospect he liked.

“You people are like nothing else, that’s for sure. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

“Blah blah.” Michael twirled Gerry’s hair in one hand and his own in another. “Let me introduce you to the cast.”

“Fine, sure.”

Michael pointed out Sasha first. “You know Sasha, yes? Yes.”

“Ah, the green helmet.”

“You catch on quickly. Good.” Michael got painfully close to point out the next person.

“That’s also Sasha,” he continued, gesturing at someone standing nearby by a dark purple bike. “Definitely judge this book by its cover. It will do you well.”

This Sasha was a stark contrast to the first one, who was short with brown skin and curly hair- this one was tall with pale skin and a sleek high ponytail. Just from the way she moved Gerry could note the difference between the quiet, kind Sasha and slow-moving wrongness of whoever this was.

“She’s not our Sasha,” Tim said, returned, and threw an arm around Gerry, also getting his face uncomfortably close. “Keep that in mind. She’s Not-Sasha, not Sasha.   
Never confuse the two. Ever.”

“Got it.” Gerry said, only partially getting it. He picked up Tim’s hand and put it over Michael instead. “Who's the short guy with the scar?”

Below, the kid Gerry was talking about was standing by a deep, almost hypnotic blue bike, shining the metal body of his bike to a sharp glint. He wasn’t far from Sasha, and even from his vantage point, Gerry could tell he was barely Sasha’s height, if not shorter.

“That is Mike Crew,” Michael said. “He has tried to steal my name. I respect him only in how he makes for an interesting rival. Cheer for him and I will push you down into the path of the bikes.”

“That’s a real threat,” Tim chimed, grinning. “We hate Mike Crew in this house. He does freakishly well in these things; there’s no way he’s not cheating.”

“The last three are Evan- he’s the well-built blond kid with the white bike, Georgie- she’s the buff girl in red, and uh, someone. I don't know who that is, and I don’t particularly care to find out.”

“Another Joseph G-something,” Tim said. “Gills? I’m not sure.”

“Gillespie?” Gerry said, recognising the name, and looked closer. Sure enough, there on the dirt track, was his lab partner from last year, currently poking at something on his bright orange bike. “Didn’t know he hung out with your crowd.”

“Doesn’t normally. Only seen him here, like, twice.” Tim’s grip tightened on Gerry. “Oh, look! It’s starting.”

All six of the riders were getting on their bikes now, and Gerry noted the clear color themes and patterns. They’d thought through visibility, clearly. 

Nikola maneuvered her way to the front of them in between what appeared to be Sasha and Not-Sasha, and dangled her exposed rainbow checkered flag in the air in anticipation. Gerry could feel Tim’s arms tense up into his shoulders and in the corner of his eye, he could see Michael’s crooked smile expand into a grin.

Nikola shouted something, and loud as it was it was most of the way to unintelligible. Gerry couldn’t help but cringe as the dirt stadium suddenly filled with the noise of a yelling Grimaldi-Orsinov, a not insignificant amount of teenagers, and six screaming motorbikes.

It took a minute or so for the motorbikes to get far away enough that Gerry felt like he could hear again, but it did happen. Tim’s screaming had died away when he could no longer see Sasha, and Michael had spent most of his energy towards repeating back the same nonsense Nikola had screamed at the start.

“What’d she scream?” he asked Tim, once Michael had gotten the sense in him to shut up. “And why is Michael continuing to scream it back?”

Gerry had more questions, many more, but he’d stick to the surface level ones for now. The answer to the other questions such as “why does this even happen?” were probably little more than “why not” and “Michael said so.”

“It is… Russian, I think,” Tim explained. ‘I don’t think any of us really know what it means, but at some point Michael started saying it too, so it’s like, a thing now or something.”

“Joseph!” Tim shouted as Nikola approached, and she grinned back. 

“Tim!” 

What followed was perhaps the most intricate handshake Gerry had ever witnessed.

“Joseph?” Gerry asked, confused.

“Oh, me, goth.” Nikola said, with a grin so close to sincere it hurt to look at.

She rolled up her flag with alarming speed, tied it together with some sort of complicated knot Gerry vaguely recognised but couldn’t name, and pointed it at him. “I’m Nikola and I’m Joseph. I’m her and I’m him. Don’t bother with it too much. I’m far more interesting than my genders, I promise.”

Gerry pushed the surprisingly sharp end of the flag away from his eyes carefully, but he was smiling a little. “Yeah, okay. Good for you.”

Nikola whacked him on the shoulder with the side of the flag, but Gerry supposed this was meant to be affectionate, or at least her way of showing Gerry her tolerance for him.

Michael grabbed at her flag before she could leave. “Do you have any insights for us, O Speedway King Nikola?”

“Oh, no. I’m not going to help you rig your bets, Michael. Never again. Besides, I’m too busy rigging my own. Be a big boy and do it yourself.” She patted him on the shoulder patronizingly.

Michael let go immediately. “Sometimes, you’re no fun.”

“Anyway, I’m only here until my bet goes through. And then I have places to be.”

Tim smirked. “Jared?”

Nikola whacked him with the flag, and Tim chuckled at it. Gerry could not say that he understood why.

“Martin and his library boy,” Nikola said, dragging out the words in a way that seemed both pitiful and spiteful all in one. Gerry was suddenly reminded of why he was here and not making excuses for why he couldn’t help his mother sharpen her knives. 

“Michael,” Gerry said, trying to drag Michael away from the conversation as best he could. He was far from weak, but Michael was oversized and very good at making life difficult for others. It took two more sentences of Nikola lamenting on the state of Jon’s skin and how she wasn’t ready for Martin to leave them just yet before Michael finally agreed to leave.

“Gerry…” Michael began, but Gerry didn’t let him speak.

“We are meeting Melanie, right?”

“She should be here, yes! I’ve recently found out that Georgie- buff, red bike, I pointed her out? That’s Melanie’s girlfriend!”

“How recently? If you’ve been wasting my- our- time, I-”

“Yesterday!” Michael said, hand on his chest like he’d been personally attacked. “I’m not that cruel. I want my nightmares gone more than you do.”

“It doesn’t matter to me whether or not you’re getting nightmares over Helen, Michael. She’s not even that scary.”

“Well, that’s rude, isn’t it?” Michael sighed. “It’s not even Helen that the nightmares are about. It’s like she’s personally making me my nightmares.”

Gerry raised an eyebrow.

“It’s always the same,” Michael continued. “Gerry, it’s always that same dream. I’m in front of her, and I’m filled with knowledge of what’s about to happen next. I’m going to become her, and her me. And then, the existential joy of being new, of becoming. And then, the agony of being stripped away and remade, replaced by a new who where I used to be. It’s never real, Gerry, never terrifying until the moment I wake up and suddenly that infinite pain of becoming something so far beyond your control works its way into my very being. It’s hard to sleep, after that.”

“Yeah,” Gerry said. “I don’t get it.”

Michael’s grin was face splitting, the sort worn by those who could not afford to stop smiling. 

“Alright,” he said, and it was a quiet sort of noise. Gerry pressed on.

“Are Martin and Jon even going to show up? Did you even tell them to meet us here?”

Michael looked almost surprised. “Did you really expect me to?”

Gerry was going to kill Michael and get sent to prison before he could ever get around to killing Helen.

Gerry chuckled, but it was strained. “You told me they would show up, Michael.”

Jon was the person who understood this the most, the person who could keep himself together long enough to even begin to string together theories and storylines. And even then, not much of what he did was particularly organised. 

Martin was a mess at the best of times, but he was a lucky mess. It felt almost like he’d managed to befriend the library, because it seemed like every time he went in and out of the shelves, he found a new Dekker or Robinson book Gerry had never even heard of.

And as for himself? Gerry was the guy behind the action, as far as he could tell. Jon would come up with a plot eventually. And then Gerry, seemingly the only one without a deep-rooted fear of the unknown, would enact on it. Probably involving a good amount of lock-picking, arson, and maybe, if he was lucky, some of his mother’s knives.

Michael was little more than a tall, blond nuisance with weirdly entrancing eyes and a helpful web of connections.

“So you lied! Again! Thanks for the help.” Gerry rubbed his thumbs into his eyebrows. “This isn’t worth it. Let’s find Melanie.”

“Sure, Gerry, sure,” Michael echoed, trailing behind as Gerry made his way back to Tim and Joseph. 

The two of them were still there on the middle level of steps, pointing at the still-racing bikes and snickering to each other. Gerry had no idea how long quasi-legal motorbike races hosted by a bunch of mildly evil high school students usually lasted, but if he couldn’t imagine it dragging on much longer. The day had been a waste so far, and he was eager to return to hiding out in an alley somewhere to read.

“Oh!” Joseph grabbed at Gerry and Michael, bodily hauling them by the arms as she dragged them further down into the arena. “You’re just about in time.”

Tim cackled behind them. “Watch Mike!”

Michael’s briefly distinguished smile returned in the form of a smirk. “Watch the blue helmet, Gerry. Nikola’s going to do it again.”

At this, Joseph let go of them, beaming. “There’s one more lap after they cross the line just now. Right now, Sasha, Not-Sasha, and Mike are near tied. This is usual behaviour. Now, here’s the thing about Mike- he always takes the innermost ring possible. He thinks it cuts down on distance, which is, eh, true enough. Anyway. Watch.”

Gerry watched. 

Down there, on the track, it seemed as if everything Joseph had said was true. Mike, with the blue helmet, hugged the inner line extremely closely. Away from him by a little was Sasha and Not-Sasha, swerving a little as they fought to be in the lead. Then out of nowhere, Mike turned suddenly, and behind him he heard Tim let out a small cheer.

Mike had turned completely sideways, the bike so tilted his handlebars had to be almost touching the dirt, and Gerry realised that this was his method of braking. Something mechanical had failed, and now Gerry watched as everyone else in the race surged ahead of the blue bike.

Gerry had to ask. “Did you cut his brakes?”

“There aren’t brakes in speedway, goth,” Joseph grinned. 

This clarified nothing. 

Joseph continued her laughing, and Michael stepped in. “This isn’t legal Speedway, by any means, but it is a crude rendition of it. Extremely light methanol bikes, financed… mostly by Evan’s side of the Lukases and their stupid amount of money. And of course, one of the main rules of speedway is that there be no brakes.”  
Gerry balked and Michael laughed. “Why.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s fun, so we do it,” Joseph said, shrugging. “As for Mike here, I will neither deny nor confirm any tampering with his bike that may or may not have happened.”

“Shit, look!” Tim said, and Gerry did his best to pry his mind off the fact that these were reckless teenagers doing motorbike racing without any brakes. “Where the fuck did he come from?”

Below, an orange-coloured biker was catching up, and Gerry watched in awe as this biker rounded the latest corner, foot skidding on the ground to slow down and tilted an extreme amount to turn. It was something to witness, and Gerry lamented, if briefly, on spending all his time aimlessly chatting with Michael’s friends and then, berating Michael. 

Gerry couldn’t really remember who was who, but this orange person had managed to catch up to both Sasha and Not-Sasha out of nowhere. As they came out of the worst bend and their bikes tilted back upwards, the orange biker was only getting father and farther ahead.

“The other Joseph G,” Joseph said, glaring. “When are you going to ban him, Michael?”

“When he starts being boring.”

Tim made a noise of frustration. “Who does he think he is?”

“Joseph Gillespie,” Joseph Grimaldi-Orsinov said with venom.

Blissfully unaware of whatever high school drama he was surrounded by, Gerry was the only one of the little group who didn’t mind it when Sasha came in second, in front of Not-Sasha but still trailing behind the unknownable and yet unbeatable Joseph Gillespie.

He had no frame of reference for what was supposed to happen or what was not supposed to happen, but Sasha had been in the lead or close to it for most of the race, and that had to be worth something.

“Cool,” he said, not without inflection, but not quite with it, either.

Tim grumbled something. Joseph wheezed half a laugh. Michael maintained his exact, unchanging grin.

“So what now?” Gerry asked after a stall. The bikers had disbanded and the people started to converge closer to the tracks, but none of this crowd of four had moved.

“The crowning,” Joseph said.

“The what?”

“Tim,” Joseph said. “You may start the fire today, if you want.”

Tim’s face lit up like a Christmas tree decorated by overeager five-year-olds.

“Oh, it’s time, isn’t it?” Michael said cryptically, and suddenly it was like a stage play had just begun. Everyone went to their spots on cue- Tim gathered himself up and descended the steps, Joseph moved to the side with more grace than was necessary, and he could see the riders lining themselves up on the track below.

Gerry didn’t think to move- a decision that would be regretted in hindsight when Michael’s forearm slammed into his face.

Michael opened his monologue with a laugh, a screeching and all-too-familiar cacophony that was louder than it should have been. It reverberated almost nicely in the dirt arena.

Gerry rubbed at his face and mumbled to himself. “Huh. It really does get weirder the deeper in you go.”

Before Gerry knew what had really happened, Tim had a fire going on in the infield and Michael was placing a small plastic crown on Joseph Gillespie’s head while Sasha and Not-Sasha bickered.

He didn’t question it. Finals were next week, and he refused to empty out a semester’s worth of French just to fill it with Michael-adjacent nonsense. Instead, he had let himself be guided through the motions, pulled down the steps by Joseph, and to where everyone had gathered.

It didn’t take much for him to decide this was his limit. When Nikola had declared his exit in his usual overdramatic manner, Gerry had meant to follow suit. 

He only got about halfway back to the road before he was stopped.

“Gerry!” a painfully familiar voice said, and Gerry was forced to acknowledge it.

“What?”

Once Gerry had turned, Michael produced a bright-coloured hair clip out from somewhere in his hair and offered it to Gerry, who had no idea what this was supposed to mean. There was a grin on Michael’s face that wasn’t reassuring, but nothing about his hands said it was a trick.

“Why?” Gerry said, but took it anyways. It was a barrette- bright, neon pink but relatively simple in design. It wouldn’t clash against his outfit, he decided, even if it would look a bit weird.

He used it to pin back the damaged hair in his face off to the side. Michael grinned. On instinct, Gerry scowled.

“Why?” Gerry asked again, quieter, this time more to himself.

“Melanie is actually here. Right over there,” Michael said, and Gerry was probably a bit too happy at the prospect of finally getting to why he came here in the first place. And yet, there was a bit of him convinced Michael was lying, and it kept him from properly getting his hopes up.

Michael hadn’t been lying. 

They found Melanie pretty easily, lounging on a blanket in the dirt like this was a beach and not the same Dunes where Gerry’s mother would come to put down captured wildlife.

“Oh, the supernatural investigators,” one of them said when they approached. 

Gerry picked the two of them apart from Martin’s small description of their hair alone- Georgie had tightly curled purple hair, white Melanie’s was jet black and in a bob. He also noted the dark sunglasses on Melanie, the chin scar on Georgie, and the confidence the both of them wielded.

Melanie turned the sunglasses down and winked at them, revealing her glazed-over and greyed-out eyes. “I’m right, right?”

“Yeah,” Michael said, plopping himself down directly on the dirt like the yellow-brown dust wouldn’t stick to absolutely everything. Georgie, having just raced, was positively covered in the stuff. Gerry wanted to remain standing, but he was not about to make himself more awkward than he already was. He sat.

“Thanks for meeting us,” Gerry said, because he knew Michael would never. “We pretty much don’t have any other leads.”

Georgie and Melanie laughed in tandem.

“Researching this stuff is like that,” Georgie said. “I never got deep into it, but I saw enough to know even just looking into it is an ordeal.”

“Okay,” Melanie said. “Recap- what do you guys know?”

“Nothing!” Michael smiled.

“I’ve read a fair bit of the Archives books,” Gerry said, trying to keep the geek out of his voice. He’s read near 80 of them as of this week, and considering how jumbled and overly detailed they can get, he thinks it something of a feat.

“Oh, those,” Melanie said. “Useless jumble of stories.”

“What,” Gerry said, like he’d been personally insulted.

“Yeah, like, I’m in one of them, right? So are a ton of other people, from all around the planet, and sometimes beyond. But some of those are from the eighteen hundreds, right? And I’ve come across a few set in the future. That's my first point- those books don’t follow time in the slightest.”

“That tracks,” Gerry said, producing a thick volume of an Archives book- (#81) and setting it before Melanie. “This one is written entirely in a… an acquaintance’s handwriting. An acquaintance who does not remember writing down his most traumatic childhood event.”

“I have no way of knowing if that’s true or what, but I’ll believe it. Weirder things have been known to happen.”

“Question?” Michael asked, holding up his hand like a primary schooler.

“No,” Melanie said. “I have a whole speech thing prepared. I’m saying it.

“Another thing is how little they talk about. Yeah, they’ll give you twenty pages on one guy’s crippling fear of being buried alive or six chapters of a dead woman’s diaries about joining a haunted circus, but they never explain why, do they?” She paused, and Gerry supposed she wanted an answer to something.

“The Other,” Gerry said. “That’s why, right?”

“And what is the Other? The Archives books don’t know, that’s for sure. Sometimes it's a hellscape, and sometimes the depiction literally purple spirals in crayon that take up a full page spread. Point number two- nothing is explained. You have to do the hands-on research yourself.”

“And you’ve done this? The research?” Michael was leaning into the conversation, uncharacteristically captivated by Melanie’s words. Gerry felt a twinge of annoyance at this- he could count the instances Michael bothered paying attention to him or Jon or Martin on one hand.

“I suppose?” Melanie waved a hand in a vague gesture. “Just ask me questions and I’ll answer what I can.”

“Okay,” Gerry said, mentally compiling a list when a notepad is handed to him by Michael. The handwriting is obnoxious to read with all the loops and the weighted lines, but it's clearly a shortlist of questions about Helen, and more generally, the Other.

“You wrote this?”

Michael shrugged. “Copied Jon’s notes, but I did handwrite it. In ink, even.”

Of course.

“So there’s this Other thing in our school library,” Gerry began, and Melanie’s eyebrows raised. “I got mesmerised by the text I was reading and managed to summon it. Michael held it off by throwing books at it, but when I read the matching poem, I couldn't put it back properly.”

“Matching… poem?”

Georgie chuckles. “Never heard that one before.”

“Yeah, read one, and you make Helen appear, read another, and you trap it. Except, not quite, ‘cause now it’s just sitting there, like a fish in an aquarium. We can see a glimpse into the Other, and it looks like it's slowly scratching its way out.”

“You know its name?” Georgie said. “That’s rare.”

“Well, technically they don’t have names,” Melanie corrects, and Georgie nods in agreement. “But sometimes the thing will start going by its host’s name.”

“Host?” Gerry asked, but Melanie kept talking.

“I’ve never met one of those, luckily enough. Most Other things will just eat you. Or leave you deeply traumatized. Host-taking Others have the power to get into a person’s body and memories, and blend into our world almost seamlessly.”

“Like corpse girl,” Georgie said, like it was meant to mean something. Then when Michael and Gerry’s faces turned up blank, she explained, tapping the scar on her chin. 

“Possessed someone I knew. Took away my sense of fear, too,” she said, like it explained anything.

“Cool,” Michael intoned, ever thoughtful.

“Elias swears he knows a hosted Other, but he also swears he’s old enough to drink.” Georgie chuckled to herself.

“It's name is Helen, right?” Melanie asked.

Michael nodded. 

“Then look for missing people named Helen from around here. That might give you a glimpse into how it ended up in your library.” She paused. “Don’t think you can get the host back, though.”

“About Helen being half-trapped-” Gerry began.

“Whoever did the trapping last messed it up,” Georgie said, simple. “And now the consequences are falling on you.”

“Oh, joyous.” Michael’s voice was not quite sarcastic, but it was unlikely to be genuine. A short silence fell over them before Melanie spoke again.

“Good luck, guys. I know it’s a bit late, but try not to leave as soon as you can. This stuff only brings tragedy.”

Michael cackled in her face. Gerry mumbled something along the lines of ‘Yeah, sure,’ but it wasn’t heartfelt. 

Gerry had to see this through, whether he liked it or not. It was not a choice, not really- the instances of his handwriting, written from the future and shown here in the past were evidence enough. 

“Let’s go,” Gerry said, picking up (#81) and attempting to dust himself off. Michael didn’t budge.

“Is it true you stabbed someone?” Michael asked before Gerry could try and physically pull him away. “Because that-”

“Woah. Look-” Georgie started, but Melanie took over for her.

“That hospital did a number on me in multiple ways, okay?” She tapped her sunglasses. “Always a price to pay. Sometimes you get something in return, but mostly it just takes. I’ve said my piece. I’m not going back to who and what I was. Get out while you can. Or don't. I don’t care.”

By some miracle, Michael allowed for Gerry to drag him away.


End file.
